The Franz Ferdinand family tree and the marriage of 1900

Archduke Franz Karl married Sophie of Bavaria on 4 November 1824.⁴ Their eldest son, Franz Joseph, became emperor of Austria in 1848 and married Elisabeth, a duchess in Bavaria, in 1854.⁷ The second son, Maximilian, became emperor of Mexico. His reign lasted three years and ended with his execution by firing squad on 19 June 1867.⁶ Elisabeth was stabbed to death at Geneva in 1898 by an Italian anarchist, Luigi Lucheni.⁷

The third son, Karl Ludwig, married three times. His first wife, Margaretha of Saxony, died in 1858 without children. His second, Maria Annunziata of Bourbon-Two Sicilies, married him in 1862 and died in 1871, and his third, Maria Theresa of Portugal, married him in 1873.³ The youngest son was Ludwig Viktor.

Franz Ferdinand was born at Graz on 18 December 1863, the eldest son of Karl Ludwig and Maria Annunziata.² His brothers Otto and Ferdinand Karl followed in 1865 and 1868.

Franz Joseph had one son, Rudolf. In 1889 he died in a suicide pact with his mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsera, at the hunting lodge of Mayerling.⁵ After the death of Rudolf in 1889 and of Karl Ludwig in 1896, Franz Ferdinand became heir presumptive to the throne of Austria-Hungary.² The Franz Ferdinand family tree shows this path from left to right across the second and third rows.

Sophie Chotek was a countess of an old Bohemian family, and she had served as a lady-in-waiting.^1,2 Under the house law of the Habsburgs she was not of equal birth, because her family was not a ruling dynasty. Franz Joseph opposed the match, and it soured relations between the emperor and his heir.¹

Permission came in 1900 on one condition. Franz Ferdinand renounced, for his future children, membership of the dynasty and the rights that went with it.¹ The wedding took place on 1 July 1900 at Reichstadt, now Zákupy, in Bohemia. Franz Joseph did not attend, and neither did the brothers of the groom or any other archduke.²

Sophie was made Princess of Hohenberg at the marriage and Duchess of Hohenberg in 1909. The name recalls Gertrud von Hohenberg, the first wife of Rudolf I of Habsburg.¹ The Franz Ferdinand family tree draws the marriage as an ordinary marriage line, and the notes of the couple record that it was morganatic.

The couple had three children, who stand at the foot of the Franz Ferdinand family tree. Sophie was born in 1901, Maximilian in 1902 and Ernst in 1904. All three took the name of their mother, von Hohenberg.¹ The family lived mainly on its own estates at Konopiště, south of Prague, at Chlum in southern Bohemia and at Artstetten in Lower Austria.¹ Sophie was born at Konopiště and died in Styria in 1990.¹¹ Maximilian was born at the Belvedere in Vienna. He did not inherit the ducal title of his mother in 1914, but Charles I made him Duke of Hohenberg on 31 August 1917.¹⁰ Ernst, also born at Konopiště, died at Graz in 1954.¹²

After 1918 Czechoslovakia took the Bohemian estates of the family. In the 1930s Maximilian and Ernst were monarchists who opposed the annexation of Austria by Germany, and after 1938 the National Socialists held them for a time at Dachau.¹ For the death of Maximilian, habsburger.net gives 1964 and Wikipedia 8 January 1962. The chart keeps 1962.^1,10

On 28 June 1914 Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were shot in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, a nineteen-year-old member of Young Bosnia.² The assassination was the most immediate cause of the First World War.²

The succession passed to the next line on the Franz Ferdinand family tree. Otto had married Maria Josepha of Saxony in 1886 and died in 1906.⁸ Their son Charles became heir presumptive in 1914 and succeeded Franz Joseph in 1916 as Charles I, the last emperor of Austria.⁹